(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a wheel cleaning system for an autonomous driving apparatus having wheels and capable of driving autonomously based on peripheral information, a control method for the autonomous driving apparatus and the autonomous driving apparatus.
(2) Description of the Prior Art
Since wheels of a vehicle are soiled as the vehicle travels outdoors, conventionally there have been demands for measures to clean wheels.
As the prior art, there has been disclosed a method of cleaning tires of a wheelchair by bringing brushes into contact with the tires (see Patent Document 1).
There has been another disclosure of a method to clean wheels for autonomous driving vehicle in which an autonomous driving vehicle is placed on a cleaning mat with its wheels (contact part to the ground) floated and the wheels are cleaned by idling the wheels while putting the wheels in contact with soft hairs of the cleaning mat (see Patent Document 2).
As another method of cleaning tires, there is a disclosure of a method of cleaning tires in which, with rollers having projections abutted against wheels, both the wheels and rollers are turned so that the projections rub the wheels thanks to the differential rotational speed between the wheels and one roller (see Patent Document 3).
[Patent Document 1]
Japanese Patent Application Laid-open 2009-172289
[Patent Document 2]
Japanese Patent Application Laid-open 2008-213568
[Patent Document 3]
Japanese Patent Application Laid-open 2004-67060
However, the technology of Patent Document 1 is configured such that the wheels of the wheelchair are rotated at a fixed position and cleaned with the brushes that are easy to perform maintenance such as replacement thereof, and is suitable to clean a large number of wheelchairs one by one. However, since the wheelchair needs to be set at the cleaning position and a worker is needed, there have been demands for unmanned cleaning methods.
As to the technologies of Patent Documents 2 and 3, either of these is a cleaning method of wheels (tires), and needs to set the vehicle to the cleaning machine to perform a cleaning operation. Accordingly, there is a problem that the vehicle after completion of cleaning has to pass back to the route through which the vehicle was brought to or accessed to the cleaning machine, hence ends up getting soiled once again.